Bryn Mawr
Classical Review 96.04.34

Following Philosophia Togata (1989), Oxford University Press
offers another collection of essays on Roman philosophy, this time with
specific focus on Cicero. J.G.F. Powell has edited the dozen papers
(including one of his own) and provided a general introduction on Cicero's
philosophical works and their background. Publication of the papers in
aggregate rather than scattered individually among the journals is
designed to strengthen their impact on scholarly perceptions (p.v). The
needs of students at early stages are catered for by the provision (except
in the papers of Glucker and Görler) of translations for cited Greek
and
Latin as well as a chronological list of the Ciceronian
philosophica. The Editor has not attempted to impose any kind of
orthodoxy on the doxai of the contributors, and indeed some
differences of opinion crop up (see below). One regrets the lack of a
general bibliography at the end; I am not sure what the "potential
inconvenience" that is said to have militated against it (p.vii) would
have been except to those charged with compiling it; but some of the
authors have appended bibliographies to the end of their contributions.
The volume concludes with a useful set of indices, viz., a general
index and indices of Greek words and of passages discussed. Limitations of
space and my own competence determine the scope of the following comments.

The Introduction dates the revival of interest in Cicero's
philosophical oeuvre from the last ten to fifteen years. This may
be roughly true of Anglo-American scholarship, but Continental scholars
such as Boyancé, Giusta, and Görler were cultivating this
corpus with
some notable results even when it had suffered deep eclipse across the
Channel. Powell notes the objection that the reassessment currently under
way may be due to "the academic habit of shifting cultivation: when the
more rewarding areas are worked out one has of necessity to move into the
less central and interesting ones" (p.1). He allows the book itself to
stand as an answer to this objection. One could, however, from another
perspective, put the problem in quite different and less defensive terms.
In the larger history of Western thought Cicero's philosophical works
occupied a place of great importance down to the nineteenth century. The
neglect, then, is of relatively recent origin and largely stems from the
preoccupation, beginning in the nineteenth century, with reconstructing
Cicero's sources. It could be claimed that the neglect was an aberration
caused by an academic trend and that the recent upsurge of interest
restores these works to their normal centrality. In general, as L.P.
Wilkinson once observed, "of all classical writers Cicero is the one whose
interest today derives in largest proportion from his
Nachleben";1 this applies a
fortiori to the philosophica. In spite of MacKendrick's recent
sweeping survey,2 some discussion -- whether
in the Introduction or a separate essay -- of problems in the reception of
the texts would have been welcome.3

Problems of Quellenforschung still exercise the authors of
some of these papers, albeit marginally. The nature of the evidence and
the strength of source-critical constructs vary, of course, from work to
work, and there is still no general agreement on approach (contrast, e.g.,
pp.203 n. and 221 n., both on the Tusculan Disputations). The
Editor addresses this method in a footnote to the Introduction (n. 20,
pp.8-9), with an explanation offered for the current trend ("The word
Quellenforschung tends now to be used pejoratively to refer to the
mechanical method of searching for sources ...");4 the point is made, however, that "there is nothing
wrong with source-analysis per se, provided that it is done
intelligently ..." Many readers would no doubt have found helpful a
detailed discussion with examples of the favored and disfavored use.

Cicero was, since his student days, devoted to the study of
philosophy, but it was by no means inevitable that this man, intent on a
career at the bar and in politics, would ever write a line of his own on
the subject. It is the virtue of Miriam T. Griffin's study of
"Philosophical Badinage in Cicero's Letters" to set Cicero's occupation
with philosophy into the larger context of his interactions with educated
contemporaries. It provides striking confirmation of Cicero's claim cum
minime videbamur tum maxime philosophabamur (N.D. 1.6). Thus
Griffin infers from the mention of Diodotus at Fam. 9.4 together
the date of Diodotus' death (59: Att. 2.20.6) that Cicero may have
been thinking about problems raised in De Fato at least fifteen
years before the composition of that treatise (p.340). She also raises an
interesting possibility as to how Cicero might have arrived at the
quasi-Antiochean view PERI\ DUNATW=N at Fat. 39-45 in the
absence of an account from his teacher's pen (p.341). In general Griffin
shows that Cicero's philosophical works should not be studied in isolation
but against the backdrop of the philosophical tastes and interests of the
time. There is gain for Cicero's letters as well, for her philosophically
alert reading refines our understanding of a number of passages.

The decision to write on philosophy was a turning point both for
Cicero and for Latin literature. He hardly had predecessors in this genre
whom he took seriously. One of the first problems was that of finding
suitable Latin terminology for the concepts in his Greek sources, a
problem addressed in two papers of this collection, a more general one by
J.G.F. Powell and in terms of a specific set of locutions by John Glucker.

Powell's paper "Cicero's translations from the Greek" (confined to
prose translations) begins frustratingly. He remarks on the variability in
"accuracy" of Cicero's renderings but chooses to conduct this discussion
in general terms without reference to a single specific "error" in
Ciceronian translation. The result is that the reader who has not already
made a special study of the subject is likely to be uncertain as to what
kinds of things he has in mind, whether minor inadvertences or major
blunders. Cicero was certainly capable of errors of various kinds, as any
close study of his philosophical works will show; but since we know of no
other ancient author whose mastery of both languages reached Cicero's
level, modern scholars will want to think long and hard before ascribing
to him, apart from acts of carelessness or misunderstandings of the matter
of a difficult original, simple errors in translating from Greek to Latin.
In fact, Powell's approach turns out to be more nuanced than appears at
the very beginning of this piece, for he has thought about other
explanations (listed on p.274) of the phenomena in the texts apart from
simple error. By way of querying the notion that the ancients' views of
translation differed markedly from ours, he includes a useful study of the
various terms for the translator and his work in classical Latin
(interpres, interpretari, ad verbum, verbum
de/e/pro verbo reddere, vertere, convertere:
pp.276-78).5

In part II of his study
Powell includes, after Jones, a list of passages from the
philosophica translated from a surviving Greek source
(pp.279-80).6 Here it might, depending upon
the flexibility or expansibility of the system of categorization, be
possible to add more items; see the list of Widmann (not cited by
Powell)7; many of her items will fall
between Powell's categories (c) ("explicitly acknowledged quotations, more
or less accurately reproduced in direct speech") and (d) ("passages freely
adapted or summarized in indirect speech"). Note, too, that the doxography
of N.D. 1 amounts to a virtual translation of those portions of
Philodemus De Pietate printed in parallel columns by Diels,8 albeit De Pietate is not explicitly
acknowledged. Powell goes on to argue (section III) that Poncelet's
strictures on the Latin language as a vehicle for philosophical expression
are one-sided.9

Section IV explores
the topic of Cicero's innovations in vocabulary in general,10 as well as constraints imposed by Latin upon the
process. The function of this section, like the previous one, is
presumably to show that the Latin language was, appropriately expanded,
adequate to express the ideas in Cicero's sources, i.e., any inadequacies
of the translations cannot be excused on grounds of the language itself.
There are really two related but somewhat different problems here: (1)
Cicero's contribution to the Latin vocabulary in general, both in coining
new words and in expanding the semantic and syntactic possibilities of
existing words -- a contribution which will be in evidence in the
speeches,
letters, etc., as well as the philosophica; (2) the specific
problem of coining technical terms for philosophy; the two are somewhat
elided in Powell's account, which emphasizes the latter in view of its
greater relevance to his overall thesis. Powell argues that Cicero's
"invention of new terms sometimes seems to have been more for display than
for use; and the display was so successful that Cicero has often been
credited with more than he either intended or achieved" (p.297). To this
statement is appended a footnote referring to Plut. Cic. 40.2,
including this list of Greek terms for which Cicero is said "first or
especially" (PRW=TOS H)\ MA/LISTA) to have provided a Latin
equivalent: E)POXH/, SUGKATA/QESIS, KATA/LHYIS, A)/TOMON, A)MERE/S,
KENO/N. Certainly Plutarch is vague ("first or especially"); but Cicero
did, in fact, provide Latin equivalents for all these terms,11 so it cannot be said that Plutarch claimed too
much. The highly fragmentary record of earlier Latin literature makes it,
of course, very hazardous to speak about which words Cicero did or did not
coin. Powell remarks of multiformis (= POLUEIDH/S) "perhaps
not an original invention of Cicero's" (p.296); the assumption is
evidently that since it is a compound it ought to be of poetic origin.
But, in fact, like a number of compounds in multi-,12 it is a prose word that hardly occurs in
poetry13; first attested at Acad.
Post. 1.26, multiformis, like multiiugis (first attested
at Att. 14.9.1), seems likely to be a Ciceronian coinage. Cicero
himself makes a rather ambitious claim for his philosophical vocabulary:
... tantum profecisse videmur ut a Graecis ne verborum quidem copia
vinceremur (N.D. 1.8), so that the argument about Cicero being
credited with more than he intended, or wanted to receive credit for,
seems dubious. Powell cites one instance of Cicero's being credited with a
word likely to have been invented by another (qualitas: p.295). But
one would need a much more detailed study of his vocabulary, both
philosophical and non-philosophical, either to establish or refute
Palmer's claim of "many new words" for Cicero.14 In any case, one will readily agree with Powell
that "what is interesting ... in all this is to see Cicero's mind at work
on the details, surmounting the concrete problems ..." (p.299).

The
starting point of John Glucker's contribution "Probabile, Veri
Simile, and Related Terms" is Cicero's statement of the position of
Academic Skeptics at Luc. 32: volunt enim ... probabile aliquid
esse et quasi veri simile, eaque se uti regula et in agenda vita et in
quaerendo ac disserendo. Glucker's problem is this: if Cicero is
rendering something similar to the PIQANAI\ FANTASI/AI with reference to
Carneades' criteria for the conduct of life at S.E. M. 7.435, why
does he add veri simile and also apply the procedure in
quaerendo ac disserendo? He establishes that veri simile and
probabile are both standard Latin translations for EI)KO/S15 and then explores the use of EI)KO/S and
PIQAN/ON in rhetoric with the result that the EI)KO/TA are
"arguments from what would appear ... to be the case," whereas the
PIQAN/ON is the "final aim" of a speech (p.124). By Cicero's time,
EI)KO/S, PIQAN/ON, and EU)/LOGON were used more or less
interchangeably in philosophical and rhetorical texts (pp.127-28), nor
does he draw a sharp distinction between probabilis and veri
similis, except that PIQANH\ FANTASI/A is invariably rendered
probabilis visio or probabile visum. Glucker claims that
both PIQAN/ON and EI)KO/S appeared in the source of
Luc. 32 (p.132). It is true that Cicero's equivalents of
A)CI/WMA, though not literal, render something in the Greek sources
(ibid.), but the same need not be true of probabile ... et quasi veri
simile (for examples of Ciceronian additions in rendering his sources
cf. Powell, p.287). Glucker rejects W. Görler's suggestion (p.133 and
n.
75) that Cicero's ascription of his regula as applied not only to
conduct of life but also philosophical inquiry to Academic Skeptics may be
an ad hoc invention to lend the statement greater authority. That
the probabile should be followed in agenda vita is a well
attested position of the Skeptical Academy. I suspect that Cicero has
mixed with that the probabile or veri simile as an object of
disputation. This extension or misunderstanding of Carneades' procedure
appears to be peculiar to Cicero, possibly a confusion with Peripatetic
doctrine (Arist. Top. 163a36-b12).16
Note that at De Orat. 1.158 the probabile alone functions as
the goal of in utramque partem disputari. Might veri simile
have been added by Cicero to make it clear in this context that
veritas itself (Top. 163b13 speaks of A)LH/QEIA) is
not in question? In general, the wording of Cicero's sources may not be so
easily inferred as has sometimes been supposed.17

Several of the papers go beyond a
discussion of individual works. The first of these is A.A. Long's on
"Cicero's Plato and Aristotle," which usefully explores the probable
agenda underlying Cicero's use of those mighty names. Cicero knew Plato at
first hand and was competent to do his own excerpting of points of
interest to him. At first glance surprising, however, is his neglect of
Plato's works on dialectic, which is explained by Cicero's having received
what he thought necessary on the subject via Antiochus (p.46). Aristotle
is a particularly tricky problem since Cicero's Aristotle (viz.,
apart from the Topics and Rhetoric, mostly the lost
dialogues) is not ours and vice-versa. In general, Cicero is seen to
follow the twofold strategy of "playing down Plato's hostility to
rhetoric" (e.g., by the use of the theory of Forms in Orator) while
playing up Aristotle's authority (p.55), albeit his Aristotle, largely
mediated via the rhetorical schools, is essentially the protos
heuretes of in utramque partem disputari, seen as a technique
for rhetorical as well as philosophical training. Long's paper ably
illustrates the important point that the tendency of specialists in
ancient philosophy to focus on the philosophica of Cicero's last
years and to ignore the rhetorica "gives many misleading
impressions" (p.39).18

Long finds
"something original and challenging" in Cicero's insistence that good
style is necessary to philosophy (59). Philippa R. Smith, however, takes
Cicero's view on this as her problem. Using as her starting point the
strictures on bad philosophical writing at Tusc. 1.6, she queries
whether the "rhetorical philosophy" Cicero advocates would not be a better
candidate for the predicate of "self-indulgent misuse of leisure and
writing" which Cicero applies to sloppy philosophical writing. She goes on
to offer a confrontation of the argumentative mode of the speeches and the
philosophica, including the impeaching of Asiatic witnesses in
Pro Flacco and of Antiochus at Luc. 69-71, and finds the two
different in the degree to which passion and ad hominem attack are
allowed free reign, but not in kind. The juxtaposition of forensic and
philosophical argument is revealing, but Smith also needed to consider the
passages in which Cicero discusses in utramque partem disputari and
its goals. This would have given her own argument on the subject
historical depth (see Long, pp.52 ff.).

In light of his exile and
recall, Cicero was moved to reexamine some premises he had held about the
res publica, statesmanship, and glory, and to search for a basis in
philosophy and history for views on these subjects. The result was his
first philosophical essay, De Republica, the subject of a paper in
this collection by Malcolm Schofield, who takes as his target the view of
M.I. Finley that the legitimacy of government was hardly raised as a
problem in ancient political discourse.19
Schofield usefully delimits res publica from the modern concept
"state" on the one hand (with an important distinction between the
entrusting and transfer of powers) and the PO/LIS on the
other; in addition, the metaphors attached to it suggest that the res
publica resonated in a Latin speaker at a much deeper level than the
civitas (pp.67-69; the patria, with its still greater
potential for appealing to the emotions, could have been brought in as
well).20 In his exploration of the famous
definition of the res publica as the res populi (Rep.
1.39), Schofield focuses on the important limitation of populus
that immediately follows (populus autem non omnis hominum coetus quoquo
modo congregatus, sed coetus multitudinis iuris consensu et
utilitatis communione sociatus) and the use in particular of
the
italicized words to exclude not only tyranny but also ochlocracy from a
res publica properly so called. The ambiguity of res enables
Cicero to take res populi in the sense "property of the public" at
Rep. 3.43, where he denies to the polity of Dionysius, tyrant of
Syracuse, the name res publica: nihil enim populi, et unius erat
populus ipse. The implicit analogy of the position of the
populus vis-à-vis the res publica to an owner in
relation to
his property is further elaborated when Cicero speaks of the deprived
populace claiming its res from the domination of a king or
oligarchy, i.e., reasserting its liberty (Rep. 3.44). Schofield
finds that "Cicero here creates an entirely new theory, cast in a legal
vocabulary which has no parallel in Greek ... Its legal inspiration makes
it a distinctively Roman contribution to political thought" (p.77). This
is an important finding, but the emphasis, I think, needs to be
distributed somewhat differently. What Cicero does is based upon the
semantic range of the Latin word res. Once res publica has
been "deconstructed" as res populi (whether first by Cicero or
Varro does not matter for our purposes), the property analogy suggests
itself all but automatically. The legal terminology, vindiciae,
rem suam recuperare, etc., used with reference to reestablishing
ownership (Rep. 3.44), is not so much the "inspiration" of this
concept as its corollary, though it may be a telling marker of the
difference from political philosophy of the Platonic/Aristotelian type (so
Schofield, p.82).

One passage from the sequel to De
Republica, De Legibus 1.39, is handled in a paper in which W.
Görler aims to refute the thesis of John Glucker, independently
formulated by P. Steinmetz, that, having begun as a supporter of Philo's
skeptical Academy, Cicero in his middle years (ca. 79-46) defected to the
dogmatic Academy of Antiochus only to return in the end to
Skepticism.21 Görler shows that a more
careful reading of a number of the texts that had been used to sustain
this thesis, including Leg. 1.39, is consistent rather with the
assumption that Cicero was always a Skeptic but was prepared to suspend
Skepticism at certain points for argumentative purposes.22 Görler receives support from Miriam T.
Griffin,
whose analysis of Att. 2.3.3 shows that Cicero remained a Skeptic
in 60, a time when the Glucker/Steinmetz hypothesis would claim him for a
dogmatist (pp.334-35). A.A. Long, too, doubts the Glucker/Steinmetz theory
of an official change of allegiance; he sees Cicero rather as
simultaneously a Philonian and Antiochean Academic -- Philonian in theory
of
knowledge but otherwise prepared to follow probabilia where they
may lead (pp.41-42); certainly this is the position taken up in De
Officiis (2.7-8).

Cicero's major works on theology, De
Natura Deorum and De Divinatione, do not form the subject of
any paper in this volume, but R.W. Sharples' study of causes and
conditions in the and De Fato will be of importance to students of
the Stoic doctrine of causation. Though not competent to comment on it in
detail, I found the paper of particular interest for calling attention to
Cicero's use of ill-fitting examples (pp.250, 263-64, 271), a phenomenon
noticeable at various points in De Officiis.23

Ethics is generously represented, with two
papers each on De Finibus and the Tusculan Disputations. I
will leave to one side M.R. Wright's well informed traversal of the
oikeiosis doctrine in Fin. 3, since I find no substantial
difference from previous treatments, and comment briefly on Michael C.
Stokes' paper, "Cicero on Epicurean Pleasures." The point of departure is
the handling of Ciceronian evidence by J.C.B. Gosling and C.C.W. Taylor in
their relatively recent The Greeks on Pleasure (Oxford, 1982).
Stokes argues that, in fact, "Cicero was a great deal less casual and less
hopelessly prejudiced against Epicurus than many other ancient sources"
(p.147) and succeeds in showing that, in spite of some inaccuracies,
Cicero is in Fin. 1-2 a generally reliable reporter even of
doctrines with which he has scant sympathy.

A.E. Douglas'
attractive paper "Form and Content in the Tusculan Disputations"
explores the implications of the term schola for this style of
philosophical writing. I would have welcomed further elaboration of what
he sees as the differences from Paradoxa Stoicorum (he calls
Tusc. an example of "philosophical rhetoric," Parad. a
"'rhetorized' philosophy": p.200).24 Douglas
views Tusc. as a very personal work, setting forth doctrines Cicero
"needs" to believe at this juncture in his life, culminating in the Stoic
doctrine that virtue is sufficient for happiness, omitted, Douglas argues,
from Fin. 3 because then it would have had to be refuted in Book 4,
but introduced by "Cicero" in Fin. 5, which is given a different
fictive date to avoid blatant self-contradiction. Douglas likewise brings
out that Tusc. differs from the other philosophica in its
more positive evaluation of philosophical writing itself -- evidently a
passing mood of Cicero's since by N.D., Div., and
Off. such work is again merely a pis aller for one excluded
from a meaningful political role (pp.205-7; p.214, n. 20).

Stephen
A. White rounds out the treatment of the Tusculans in this volume
with a masterly discussion of the therapies for dolor in Book 3.
The subject was not of merely theoretical interest to Cicero, for it was
the death of his beloved Tullia that provided the occasion for the new
series of philosophica, including the Tusculans themselves.
White accordingly sketches in the personal background before launching
into the details of the theories.25 It is in
essentials the story of how the Stoics gradually gained in effectiveness,
abandoning efforts to use therapy as a vehicle for conversion to Stoic
values and substituting a therapy of beliefs about how one should react in
certain situations. White finds Cicero, though not original here, a well
informed and judicious purveyor of Stoic doctrines; indeed his account is
"more sympathetic than most of what survives" on the subject and "arguably
broader and more systematic" than what Seneca and Epictetus provide
(p.246).

The Cicero who emerges from these pages is a keen
philosophical amateur, well read in certain periods and branches of
philosophy and at pains to present the doctrines accurately to Roman
readers. If the days are past when anyone would characterize a Ciceronian
philosophical essay as "le meilleur ouvrage de morale, qu'on ait
écrit et
qu'on écrira,"26 it is also true that,
as
this stimulating book shows, Cicero the philosophical hack is dead and
buried, and his own perspective and agenda in philosophical writing are
coming more clearly to the fore.

[6] Ibid., 24-26. Apart from a differentiation between
direct quotations and passages summarized in indirect speech, Powell adds
N.D. 1.45 and Fin. 1.57 and 63 (all summarized) as well as
Rep. 6.27 as a translated passage with unacknowledged source.

[10] Here the
possibility of simple borrowing is raised (p.288) but not pursued further;
reference might have been made to Päivö Oksala, Die
griechischen
Lehnwörter in den Prosaschriften Ciceros (Helsinki, 1953).

[17] I doubt that the
Latin-Greek glossary which circulated in late antiquity as that of
Philoxenus should be associated with the 1st century B.C. Alexandrian
grammarian of that name (see Appendix B to Glucker's paper). The latter
clearly knew some Latin but exploited that knowledge to clarify the
etymologies of Greek words and problems of Greek morphology; one suspects
that such glossaries originated at a lower level of scholarship.

[18] A couple minor points: at p.37, n. 2 for Cicero's
"Academy" Long might rather have cited the earliest reference to it
(Att. 1.11.3 [August, 67]); "an orator manqué" (p.59)
is not
quite what Cicero calls Plato, rather a philosopher who could have been a
successful orator (Off. 1.4).

[25]
Here, however, he ennobles the grounds for Cicero's divorce from
Terentia by connecting it with "anxiety for the future of Rome" (p.222).
In fact, Cicero's distrust of her probity in financial dealings is the
likely cause; cf. S. Weinstock, RE 5A1 (1934), 713.18 ff. (s.v.
Terentia).